I awoke at 4:20 a.m. in the midst of a dream with a crystal clear, 360 degree view of my home sit spot at Prompton Lake, the spot where I spent an hour a week during my year-long nature watching project. A voice from the dream whispered insistently, “Get up now. Get out to your sit spot.”

Half awake, half immersed in the dream, I tried to make sense of the view and the voice. A longing to visit my sit spot had been growing over the last days. A blizzard, forecasted to hit in a few days, would limit opportunities to get outside. And, if I had learned anything through my experiences with nature, it was to heed the voice of intuition.

Decision made, I drifted off for another hour and woke up spontaneously at 5:30. Normally, if I had planned an early morning sit spot, I would have prepared the night before; packed binoculars, field guides, notebook, pencils, and camp chair in the car, and set out a mug for a bracing cup of morning tea.

Just keep it simple I told myself.   Slipping out of bed, I did a brief meditation and a few yoga stretches as the first light inched above the eastern horizon. Anticipating the cold, I dressed in layers, turtle neck, flannel shirt, and wool sweater. I slipped downstairs, slurped a glass of orange juice, swallowed a few spoonsful of yogurt, and stepped out of the door, binoculars around my neck, notebook stuffed in my coat pocket.

The drive to Prompton felt pleasingly familiar and brought back memories of all the mornings I drove this route through the country side, by the houses and hills, by the fields, forests, and farms. Suddenly, I remembered my theme music, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. I fingered through my collection of CDs, found it, inserted it, and as the pure piano notes of the opening theme rang through the car, felt shivers roll up and down my spine

As I had done during my year of sit spot visits, I opened my mind for the word or words that might describe the essence, message, or lesson of the session ahead. The word return popped into awareness. I smiled. This was easy to figure out. It was my return to my home sit spot.

I parked in the boat ramp lot, looked out, and saw a vast sheet of blue-gray ice covering the lake. Here and there a few branches stuck straight up; perhaps markers left by the now departed ice fishermen. Along the shoreline a few slender streaks of open water shimmered against the honeycombed edge of the ice.

As soon as I stepped out of the car I heard Canada Geese honking from the upper end of the lake where the inflowing Lackawaxen River created open water. A flock, honking loudly, lifted off the water, shuffled themselves into a loose lopsided V, and flew down the lake toward me, passing directly over, low enough that I could hear their strong feathered wings rhythmically fanning the air. A welcoming flyby I thought.

Under a heavy, low, gray sky I strode across the parking lot and onto the West Shore Trail. Residues of an overnight rain slipped off the tree branches and plopped softly onto the mottled brown and tan carpet of last year’s leaves. Drops of water shaped like tiny crystal orbs clung to the underside of slender branches. The spongy brown mud of the trail grasped at my boots forcing me to move to firmer ground.

I stepped under a row of tall white pines and through a stand of slender, second-growth ash trees. My feet knowingly followed the trail down toward the lake shore, past the flat moss covered rocks of an old stone wall, and then back up hill to the softly murmuring seep where spring water oozing out from an old stone wall nourished a verdant swath of wild cress and water weeds. Treading carefully over the wet rocks, I recalled that his ever-green, ever-flowing seep had marked the transition into the realm of the sit spot.

Angling into the woods, I walked through a cluster of red maples and arrived at the slightly elevated ground of the peninsula. Pausing, I heard high pitched “tsee, tsee, tsee” calls. Lifting my binoculars, which were at the ready around my neck, I spotted a small flock of aptly named golden-crowned kinglets, tiny, busy birds flitting through the stems of red twig dogwood. Yet another welcoming committee I thought with a smile.

I set up my camp stool at my home spot near the point of the peninsula under a tall, dark-barked black cherry. Ahead, I looked into the open woods and to either side could scan up and down the lake. The time was 6:55, the temperature 38 degrees, the wind light at 2 mph hour out of the WNW. With notebook on my lap, I settled in, opened my senses, and began to write down all that I saw, heard, felt and smelled during each ten minute interval.

An early March chorus of bird songs sounded through the woods. I heard the familiar winter songs; the cheerful “chickadee-dee-dee” of a nearby chickadee, the soft “dit, dit, dit” flock calls of juncos, the nasal “yank, yank, yank” of a white-breasted nuthatch, the raucous “jay, jay, jay” of the blue jays, and across the lake the strident “caw, caw, caw” of a family of crows. Then I began to hear spring songs, the long, bright, whistled “whoit, whoit, whoit” call of a cardinal, the “chack, chack, chack” of newly arrived red-winged blackbirds, the honking of a pair of geese flying along the shoreline, and from deep in the woods across the lake the resonant braggadocio drumming of a pileated woodpecker.

This was a blended chorus, winter calls and spring songs. Behind me rang the high pitched, rapid, lilting, complex, chattery, spring song of a golden-crowned kinglet. This March morning was a return for the birds as well, some early migrants returning from the south while the resident birds returned their attention to the spring tasks of claiming territory and attracting a mate.

I looked out at a patch of open water in the narrows between the peninsula and the other shore. Two bright mostly white ducks flew by, common mergansers. High above, a pair of wood ducks flew up the lake, the female’s plaintive “ooEEK, ooEEK” carried through the morning air. Open water and newly arrived migratory ducks signified the shifting of the seasons, the return of spring, the season of rebirth.

I inhaled the fresh smell of rain drops and the earthy fragrance of the wet composting leaves. Identifying the surrounding trees had been a favorite activity of mine during my year at Prompton. I looked now and recognized the furrowed brown-gray bark of the ash trees, the smoother gray bark of the red maples, and the dark scaly bark of the black cherries. I continued to gaze at the tree trunks, determined to keep looking until I saw something new.

And there, on the ash trees, was much more than just the pattern of the bark. The trunks were blotched with light and dark greenish patches of various sizes, shapes and shades starting at ground level, spreading up and around the trunk, another complete world of growth.  These were tree dwelling lichens, fungi and algae living in symbiotic harmony using the tree for a handy place to grow.

My gaze drifted down to the shoreline, to the lacy branches of the gray birches, to the whitish trunks and dark chevrons where the branches emerged, a pattern of light and dark, chalky white bark, dark arced chevrons.   As I gazed the gray birches began to fill the foreground of my vision while all the other trees and shrubs blurred into the background. The black and white birches became a vision of beauty, a beauty beyond the hand of a painter, beyond the eye of an interior decorator.

I reflected on these moments when perception shifted and expanded outside of what I was looking for, of what I was expecting to see. These moments seemed simultaneously disorienting yet enriching. Perhaps as the world of the lichen came alive, and the beauty of the birches was illuminated, for several brief moments my usual subjective creation of reality was suspended. In this moment gaps and openings appeared in the armor of my self-created reality. And through those gaps pulses of truth or reality or beauty or essence or something I didn’t have a word for flowed in changing me, nourishing me, forever altering my perception.

My hour was up too quickly, yet my hands were chilled and fingers were numb. The prospect of hot coffee, a freshly cooked omelette, and toast smeared with butter and raspberry jam spurred me in to action. I stood, turned, and saw thin mist floating over the icy lake, saw the sun lifting above the mist, above the hills beyond the lake, a bright gold orb piercing thick, dark, gray, clumpy clouds.

I walked back along the trail. All around me the winter-spring morning chorus continued, the crows, jays, geese, and blackbirds along with the soft “coo, coo, coo” of a mourning dove. I felt restored, refreshed and rejuvenated. It had been a good return.